How I found the poets and how I left them: A librarian’s apology for

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Citation Stoddard, Roger E. 2016. How I found the poets and how I left them: A librarian’s apology for bibliography. Harvard Bulletin 25 (2), Summer 2014: 20-36.

Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37363341

Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem: A Librarian’s Apology for Bibliography

Roger E. Stoddard

Te ninety-ffh George Parker Winship Lecture, delivered in the Forum Room, Lamont Library, October 11, 2012, on the occasion of the publication of A Bibliographical Description of and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820, compiled by Roger E. Stoddard, edited by David R. Whitesell (University Park, Pennsylvania: Published by Te Pennsylvania State University Press for the Bibliographical Society of America, 2012).1

[Editor’s note: Tis monumental publication and achievement received the Modern Languages Association Bibliography Prize in 2015.]

I

n October 18, 1962, in this room I spoke in public for the first time. It was a regional meeting of the Bibliographical Society, William Jackson Ohad recommended me as a speaker, and President C. Waller Barrett gave his assent. So I came up from Providence, where I was employed by the Brown University Library, to speak on “C. Fiske Harris, Collector of American Poetry and Plays.” In the summer before, I prepared at the Brown Library, where staf delivered to me bundles of correspondence, never before untied, from the papers of John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886). Bartlett’s career intersected with Harris’s from his days in New York City through his seniority at the Brown mansion as the family’s librarian. He would be succeeded in that ofce by George Parker Winship, in whose honor this lecture series is named. Robert Metzdorf, editor of the Society’s Papers, grabbed my manuscript and published it in ffy-seven (1963), supplementing, in a way, my article on “Oscar

1 Roger Stoddard thanked William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for introducing him as the ninety-ffh Winship lecturer, and he reminisced about introducing sixty- three lecturers in the series when he managed it. He dedicated the lecture “To my bosom buddy Marcus A. McCorison,” who was not able to attend. Te lecture script was issued privately, with other pieces, in A Fall of Reason (Le Cirque du Livre, 2012).

20 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem Wegelin, Pioneer Bibliographer of American Literature,” which he had published in the preceding volume. So, what’s going on here? A bio-bibliography of a bookseller responsible for some sixty publications largely bibliographical, among them the frst of American plays, American fction, and American poetry. Ten, a thick account of a forgotten but major collector in a unique feld, linking him up with his only predecessor and with the scholars and booksellers of his day, both here and abroad. But it’s not the real thing, is it? Just poking around on the periphery of something: the real thing is early American poetry. So, you need to learn the limits: whose poetry, when? We’re talking poetry written in what is now the United States, starting at the beginning with Newes from Virginia (1610) by R. Rich, Gent., and ending with several undateable (by me) pamphlet poems that may have been printed about 1820. But why your interlocutor would begin his studies with a bibliographer and a book collector, signals where he is coming from. As many of you know, I am from that suite of rooms around William Jackson’s ofce on the Yard-end of the ground-foor corridor of Houghton Library opposite Philip Hofer’s ofce and his Graphic Arts study room. Houghton Library was designed from the beginning, you see, to accommodate both the head and the heart of the book: Jackson with his intellectual history, analytical bibliography, and the creation and completion of author collections, and Hofer with his arts of the book from the manufacture and decoration of paper to the layout of pages and the covering of books, always intriguing with the artists from Dürer to Picasso. And I entered Jackson’s ofces straight from Goodspeed’s Book Shop on Beacon Street, and Goodspeed’s directly from my dormitory room at Brown University where I maintained the stock of old books I sold in partnership with Jay (John G.) Blair—who would become father of Ann Blair, queen of Book History and herself an alumna of the Houghton Library book stack where she held her student job. In my boyhood, books accumulated around me, and I would read in some of them, but I had no focus until I discovered Sherlock Holmes. I resolved to read all the stories, but also everything else written by their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and that sent me on a quest for books. I do not think I ever saw in those days a frst by Conan Doyle, but American reprints would turn up in Boston book stocks, and I could aford them. George Gloss had just bought the Brattle Bookshop, and he treated me like an adult customer. Without his help and encouragement I could not have gotten very far—with Conan Doyle or with books in general. For a while I fell under the spell of Dagobert D. Runes and his Philosophical Library. You could order books by mail, English translations of exotic fgures such as J. P. Sartre. Once I chose Corydon, André Gide’s defense of homosexuality, a book I would not forget. Much later, as a curator, I would buy for Harvard the 1923 N.R.F. reprint from the Phoenix Bookshop in Greenwich Village (number 225 of 500 copies hors de

Roger E. Stoddard 21 commerce), and I was surprised to fnd prior during my bi-annual library book acquisitions tour of the Paris antiquarian booksellers in 1977: at Blaizot’s one titled C.R.D.N. from Bruges, 1911, one of twelve copies printed privately, and just around the corner at Coulet et Faure another private from Bruges, 1920, revised and titled Corydon, #19 of 21 copies. So, thanks to Runes and my boyish curiosity, Harvard can show you the whole story of Gide’s most obscure book. It was not until my junior year at Brown that books intruded in my life again when Jay Blair challenged, “Let’s go into the book business and fnd a Fanshawe!” We got into the book business soon enough—we each contributed $50 to our acquisition fund, and we drove around the North Shore and found an antique dealer who had just bought a household, and who was glad to slough of the books for the money we had. Fanshawe, no way! As Jay knew, and I was to fnd out, it was Hawthorne’s anonymously published frst book, known for a rarity since the late nineteenth century. If W. A. White had not given the book to Harvard back in 1917, I never would have seen a copy. As we packed and unpacked I noticed some books on behavioral psychology I thought my professor might like the library to buy, so I trundled them into the library and made our frst sale. Now when you go into the book business you depend on your experience as a collector, on the goodwill and conversation of established dealers, and on your reference library of bibliographies and catalogs. For instance, when John Kohn, the foremost dealer in American literature, showed me a pamphlet called Noël, I could identify it as a poem composed by Longfellow for his friend Agassiz to accompany a gif of wine and printed in only six copies. (I had been the 1924 auction catalog of the Stephen L. Wakeman .) John ofered me a job—they all ofered you a job in those days. And when I spotted a copy of Will’s Wonder Book in the stock of a book scout downtown in Providence, I knew that it was a real fnd! Only the second copy to surface of a book only recently discovered to contain several stories by Louisa May Alcott. It was known to me because I subscribed to Antiquarian Bookman, and I had bought and scanned a copy of the frst volume of Bibliography of American Literature, just published in 1955. We’ll come back to BAL, so-called, and Alcott, but I want to tell you about some bibliographies that made money for me. First there was Lyle Wright’s bibliography of American fction published from 1774 until 1850. In my time you could fnd the cheap fction of the 1840s—remember Te Black Avenger of the Spanish Main?—in places where they didn’t care for it and sell it to librarians who cared a good deal. Ten there was Oscar Wegelin’s bibliography of early American poetry published in 1930. It was a fabulous achievement, but it was so far out of date that you could fnd lots of pamphlets and broadsides “unrecorded by Wegelin,” as you would brag when you ofered them for sale. I became deeply intrigued by the Wegelin, most particularly by the idea of the lost editions (Cambridge, 1662 and 1666) {that’s our Cambridge, not theirs; the author

22 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem graduated in the Harvard Class of 1651} of Michael Wigglesworth’s warning verses on Te Day of Doom. I knew that Larry Romaine had sold to Lawrence Wroth for the John Carter Brown a copy of Wigglesworth’s other book, Meat Out of the Eater (1670), bound with fragments of an unidentifed early edition of Te Day of Doom. I ordered photostats, just in case. When I learned that Wegelin was a bookseller, I was encouraged to think that I might revise his book afer I retired from trade. As for Will’s Wonder Book, when I compared my copy with the entry in BAL, I could see that I had a variant binding (P cloth: orange), but I was unable to collate the book by signatures: <1–5>8. (In the nineteenth century, books were printed on machine-made paper, cut to publisher’s measure, and you have neither chainlines nor watermarks to help.) I asked my professor, Lawrence Wroth at the John Carter Brown Library, how to do it. If you are interested in that, you should consult the editor Jacob Blanck in his ofce at Houghton Library, he ofered. So, I made my way to Mr. Blanck’s ofce on the second foor of Houghton Library, and I showed him my book. He logged it in his manuscript, showed me how to collate it, and ofered me a job—they all ofered you a job in those days. Ten he took me down to the ofce of the librarian, William Jackson, as he thought that Jackson might like to buy my book. Instead, Jackson telephoned Parkman D. Howe, premier collector of New authors. Mr. Howe liked the sound of my book, so he met me later in the day at my parent’s house in Needham, and he paid me $125, the price suggested by Mr. Blanck. Much later I learned that my book was passed around the table at Saturday lunch at the Club of Odd Volumes, all the usuals in attendance: George Goodspeed, William Jackson, Philip Hofer, David McCord, et al. Afer my junior year I got a summer job in Goodspeed’s Book Shop on Beacon Street. Teir motto was “Anything Tat’s a Book,” and I liked that a lot. It was true! I admired the staf for their expertise, and I thought that I might spend my life with them. In my senior year at Brown I continued to work with my pals in the Providence and Boston antiquariat, I formed a collection of Nathaniel Parker Willis for a Brown professor, and I spent a lot of time with Peter Brogren, who worked with me to bind up a set of Te Month at Goodspeed’s given to me by the editor Norman Dodge as a parting gif at the end of the summer. I had barely enough credits to graduate in the Class of 1957; at least I didn’t drop out for books and destroy my parents. I returned to Goodspeed’s, working this time for Mr. Goodspeed and learning a lot about the whole business. I was called up for six months of active duty with the U. S. Army Reserve, and toward the end of my stint I received a letter from Jackson ofering a two-year appointment as his assistant, “no sinecure,” as he expressed it. I called on Mr. Goodspeed and told him that I would spend two years with Jackson learning bibliography and return to the shop a better bookseller. He replied, “If you leave the book business now, you never will return.”

Roger E. Stoddard 23 II

Life speeded up. I fnished my duty, married my Pembroke sweetheart Helen Heckel, we visited Colonial Williamsburg (briefy), we found an apartment on Garfeld Street, and on July 1, 1958, I presented myself at Houghton Library. Jackson gave me his keys to the Houghton and Widener buildings and lef for a month of work in British and bookshops, also some days in Paris, as he had just started to work with the Paris antiquariat. With Jackson gone, I learned the job from William B. Todd, whom I was succeeding and the library catalogers. It turned out that I would be working more for them than for Jackson, as I would be required to make the initial records (far more skeletal than our so-called “stub” records of today) for all accessions of the library, including those from the Teatre Collection and Graphic Arts. Te multi-part card forms that my typist would make from my copy would be revised, that is “corrected” by catalogers before they would be fled in the catalog and typed on sheets for the accession book when Jackson would have his chance to make corrections. Excellent experience for a person who had never made a library record in his life! I was a quick study and managed to avoid shame most of the time. (I never stopped to think that I might be asked to leave the library if I didn’t measure up.) Te basis of my job was even more risky, as I had to check against Harvard holdings all the books that interested Jackson in oferings from dealers and in their catalogs. Te authority was what we called the “Union” or “Ofcial” card catalog. It flled the space now occupied by the Circulation Division, and there were high tables between the banks of catalog cabinets, so you could pull out a drawer and place it beside your work for the checking. Te “OC,” as we called it, was an extravagant tool, but also a treacherous one. Extravagant because it held cards for the Widener and Houghton collections, including our accession cards, but also some cards from the Law School, Business School, old Boston Public Library cards, and some cards from Wellesley College. Tere were also cards for Curt von Faber du Faur’s great collection of German Baroque books, held at Harvard until the German Department refused to ofer him an appointment; when Yale succumbed, the result was predictable. (Te cards remained to taunt us afer the books were gone.) Treacherous, because there was a single card for each book, entered and fled under the main entry, that is the ofcial Harvard version of the author’s name. (A real sporting proposition, the multiple access points of today are for sissies: any fool can fnd the book!) Over time I would complain in the Modern Greek Section that they had split the fle of Kavafy’s works, half under the international form and half under the Greek Καβαφής, and in the Slavic division that they had two forms of the name of Tsvetaeva, the Russian poetess.

24 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem I spent the summer accessioning backlog and checking ofers sent from British and French dealers of books set aside afer Jackson’s visits. I attended summer camp of the U. S. Army Reserve, and Jackson cruised the Maine coast with the Wheatland brothers, David and Stephen, friends of the library. Finally the fall season commenced, and I found out what the rest of my life would be about.

III

William Jackson was a tall and handsome man, in his ffies when I knew him, with a hairline that was receding (see fgure 2.1). He had a sof voice, never raised in my presence. I have never met a man who wore sports jackets and suits with such grace. Rodney Dennis used to remark, “What’s a lad from South Pasadena doing with the manners of an English lord?” Californians tell me that Pasadenans were that way, but they will not say if Pasadenans taught manners to English lords! He led by example: weekdays he worked for the library while an assistant labored on the revision of the Short-Title Catalogue in the back room—where he would spend his Saturdays and Sundays. Once a month, he would walk through the library from top to bottom. It became obvious that he knew more about early English books than visiting experts such as John Sparrow and John Carter. Tat would come out in conversation with the Collation Club (the men of the library staf) on Tuesdays over sherry in the librarian’s ofce before lunch in an upstairs room of the Faculty Club. I have said ofen that he had the greatest book mind of his generation, that is he could recall the qualities of copies of books he had seen in collections, in libraries, or in commerce, and he was looking at books and reading about them all the time. Catalogs would arrive from antiquarian booksellers all over the world. Many from France or England came in the form of proof sheets or with “” stamped on them, as Jackson encouraged his regular dealers to give him an advantage. Tere is only one copy of each rarity, and the frst order gets it. Many of you are long familiar with the Harvard Library, so you know that it is virtually impossible to try a subject or author not represented in it: ofen you will fnd a world-class holding. Bentinck-Smith’s Building a Great Library, a tribute to Archibald Cary Coolidge, explains how the library became universalized and internationalized in the 1920s. For librarians, sustaining the historic collections meant confronting them and fnding the missing pieces or comparable new things. So Jackson would tick the books that interested him. He would choose original editions of French and English literature, Spanish and Italian books, rarely German ones, some science, Renaissance Latin verse and drama. Ofen he would choose an inexpensive association copy, more important for its ownership and history than for its text. It was my job to rush around the OC to fnd duplicates whether at Houghton, Widener, or elsewhere. On the way back to the ofce I would scoop up the Widener

Roger E. Stoddard 25 Figure 2.1. Unsigned, undated photograph of William A. Jackson in Houghton Library. 25.5 x 20.5 cm. MS Storage 322, box 6.

26 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem copies, casting an eye to the right and lef of the book in question to grab anything that looked worthwhile. In those days Widener was still stocked with rarities, lots of sixteenth-century books, for instance. Once I brought back a ffeenth-century book, so Jackson told me to report that to Frederick Gof at the Library of Congress, who kept the census of American copies. Once in a slipcase of ephemera, I found an unrecorded piece of Cambridge seventeenth-century printing in a Native American language. (Jackson challenged me to write it up, but I didn’t know enough to be able to do that.) I would return to the ofce, Jackson and I would sit side by side, he with the catalog, I with my pile of Widener books, perhaps also with a bibliography, if there were problems. Jackson would go over each book with me. He would notice any faults to the book that I had discovered, and he would decide if a Widener copy was in condition ft for transfer. Ten he would cable or telephone his order for the rest while I took the books for transfer to the catalog department. For the nineteenth-century French books Jackson would order copies on grand papier, as publishers used to ofer, say, ffy copies on hollande (a good grade of paper stock with chain lines) and, say, ten copies on japon (a cloudy stock, but durable). Te balance of the edition would be printed on papier ordinaire, and in time that has turned brown and brittle. Jackson knew what he was doing! It was always exciting to see the books Jackson ordered when they arrived, but one took care before processing dealer’s invoices for payment. Apprentices in the German and British book trade spend hours collating new stock, ofen docketing their fndings on the endpapers; apprentices in French book shops spend their time folding chemises around printed wrappers. A substantial sixteenth-century French book would arrive with a pedigree of several of the old collections, but it would lack a leaf right in the middle that no one had ever noticed; a “frst edition” of Victor Hugo would turn out to have “3e éd.” printed before each signature mark. So I made the acquaintance of the Paris antiquariat by returning bad books to them and making deductions from their invoices. Jackson used to say that I earned my salary in the value of bad copies returned to the trade. If there was time to spare, then I would accession from the backlog of books chosen for Houghton but never entered in any catalog, and there were diversions in Widener. Gifs and Exchange was a lively place. Once a man backed his car up to Widener and lef a gif of books that included a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare. D North 70 was a treasure cave occupying what is now given over to digitization; it held thousands of books that had been received in Widener, cataloged, but never classifed and sent to the shelf. One day you would be checking up a sixteenth-century German book for Jackson, next day you would fnd another by that author from 1510: Help yourself, and accessioning was eased for there was a catalog card in every book. But accessions were not the only activity at Houghton, as I was soon to notice.

Roger E. Stoddard 27 IV

Paris is the city of books, as I can from experience testify, but I was to learn that Houghton was the library of both books and bibliography. Jacob Blanck was producing Bibliography of American Literature, volume by volume, in his second-foor ofce, and you could take your brown-bag lunch there with him and other stafers. His work was rooted in U.S. copyright entries and signature collations of the books—a radical development mandated by Jackson that turned out to be crucial. On the mezzanine, James Walsh was working on a bibliography of the Hungarian humanist Johannes Sambucus based on visits to European libraries; in time he would publish a bibliography of the Hofmannsthal collection and a classic catalog of incunabula at Harvard. Also there, Ruth Mortimer was creating an historical catalog of illustrated sixteenth-century French books collected by Philip Hofer. When she had completed a few sheets she would visit Jackson for review. On the ground foor Philip Hofer and Eleanor Garvey were completing work on Te Artist & the Book, the one publication for which Houghton Library always will be known, for Hofer’s brilliant connoisseurship and Garvey’s steady bibliographical hand. (Hofer was the greatest collector of his generation, and his collection of livres de peintres [painter’s books] defned the genre.) W. H. Bond’s Supplement to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada would be coming out in 1962. Ten, there was Te Master. In his ofce, William Jackson sat behind a large work table, and behind his chair at arm’s reach were shelved the plump volumes of his catalog of Carl H. Pforzheimer’s great collection of early English literature 1475–1700, the gold standard of descriptive bibliography. Plump, because he had his own copy interleaved with ruled paper; from time to time you would fnd him inscribing a note: a change of ownership, another vertical title found, or a useful new citation. His three-page, double column “Index of Bibliographica” (such as “Division of Copy, compositors, printers” and “Reimposition”) must have been threatening to fellow practitioners when the book came out in 1940. As for the STC—A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640—how would you describe it to those who don’t know it when they see it? Under the management of the great library administrator and book historian Alfred W. Pollard (sure to have become a don except for his stutter), STC came out with its 26,000 entries in 1926. Jackson got his copy interleaved as an undergraduate in Williams College, and he never ceased inscribing corrections and additions; in 1946 the Bibliographical Society () entrusted a revised edition to him in partnership with the Englishman F. S. Ferguson. Jackson extended my appointment for a third year, “since I was making such good progress with the backlog.” I hired my old partner Jay Blair for the summer, so we both

28 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem wrote out slips at a furious pace. In the fall I hired a second typist to make the cards and sheets. I called on Mr. Goodspeed, this time to say that I wanted to be able to buy into the corporation if I returned to the shop. He said no, so I said good-bye to bookselling and hello to libraries and bibliography. When I informed Mr. Wegelin that I was working on addenda to his American poetry bibliography, he handed me a fstful of cards on which he had inscribed descriptions of books that he had seen and on which he had pasted clippings from bookdealers’ catalogs. Tose I edited, annotated, and typed of in two copies, as Solemn Lamentations on the Eternal Nature of Bibliography: Being 282 Verses, a title not to the liking of Mr. Wegelin, I regret to say. I needed a job, so I applied to David Jonah, the Brown librarian (trusting that they always ofered you a job in those days). He did give me one: to understudy and succeed the Curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays.

V

My days in the Harris Collection were the happiest of my library life, but that is a story for another time. Let me explain here the steps I was able to take at Brown leading toward publication of the new bibliography. David Jonah relinquished prior claim to a revision of Wegelin’s bibliography, and his wife Bess gave me a fle of 4” x 6” cards on which she had pasted entries from two copies of it. Eventually I would gang them and photocopy them onto 8 ½” x 11” sheets so that I could work from a notebook. I pulled down, examined, and described qualifying books from the Harris Collection, and at night I borrowed one by one the thirteen volumes of Charles Evans’s American Bibliography, the twenty-nine volumes of Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotheca Americana, the twenty volumes of Shaw and Shoemaker’s continuation of Evans, and as many of the old state imprints bibliographies as I could fnd. I inscribed entry numbers, copy locations, and notes of authors and printers on my cards. Also I kept notebooks, as I wanted to record some other things, and I was not sure if I would be reading those bibliographies again. I sent entry numbers for Carriers’ Addresses (i.e., newspaper carriers) to Gerald McDonald at the New York Public Library and for printing history items to Rollo Silver in Boston as they were working on those subjects. (Afer several sets of Sabin entry numbers, Gerald wrote back: “I know what you are doing.”) My experience with Evans and Sabin was cautionary: I enjoyed reading Evans’s chronological fle with new books and reprints coming out all together in the same year. Sabin is a grand bouillabaisse of languages and subjects alphabetized so you can check for a book of interest in order to learn its editions and translations and where copies may be found. I have ofen recommended the reading of these great bibliographies to others, but so far I have encountered only reluctance. As John Crow wrote in the

Roger E. Stoddard 29 second edition of Andrew Block’s bibliography Te English Novel: “You can use the book for much more than rapid fnding of the wanted fact. It deserves reading for its own sake.” Crow knew, for he had read the British Museum catalog, and he could direct you to entries that you would never have found on your own! Jonah paid my way for a week of work at the New-York Historical Society to track and describe the unrecorded books that Wegelin had discovered there and one week at the Library of Congress, where I could search my fle in the National Union [card] Catalog. It was there that my old skills of searching the Harvard OC fast and accurately saved me; later I would search the Huntington Library, Sterling Library, and Library Company catalogs. During “Bibliography Week,” when out-of-towners gather in New York City, John Kohn showed Jackson the books that I had bought for Brown. Jackson complimented me on getting “the early things.” I did not tell Jackson that elsewhere I had also acquired Siesta in Xbalba and Return to the States and Howl!, those pre-publication mimeographica that initiated Allen Ginsburg’s poetic revolution, nor did I send to him my catalog of the “3 Beat Poets” exhibition that I mounted in 1962. Easy does it. Jackson had changed my life forever, and his sudden disappearance would turn it irrevocably.

VI

William Jackson died on October 18, 1964, in his ffy-ninth year, long before he could have completed his revision of the Short-Title Catalogue. He had received the honorary Oxford DLitt in June and had attended a meeting of the elite Roxburghe Club to which he had just been elected. News reached me on a Sunday, and I drove in from our house in Barrington and sat for hours in the Harris Room in shock and sorrow. He was the absolute center of our (little) world. I traveled to Cambridge with Tom Adams, John Carter Brown librarian, for the memorial service. Tom was saying that with Jackson dead, Harvard would come for me. I said that was ridiculous: I had spent the last four years dealing strenuously with books that had no relation to the European cultural traditions on which the Harvard Library, and particularly Houghton, were structured. Tom was usually right about such things, and he was right this time. Months later I drove down to Mamaroneck to seek John Kohn’s advice. “You’ll have a wider feld,” he encouraged. I agreed to go. When I told Jonah, he said that he was glad to have had me on his staf for as long as four years. My new boss, the Houghton librarian W. H. Bond told me that Jonah had written him an unsolicited letter praising my work in acquisitions. My long years at Houghton under Bond and his successors may be told some other time but not today. In 2006, I would deliver the eulogy and Faculty Minute for William Henry Bond, one of the great heroes of the Harvard Library. Here I will declare my

30 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem own debt to Bill Bond for calling me back to Harvard where I could do things that I could never have done anywhere else, in the exhibition hall, seminar room, lecture hall, Harvard Library Bulletin, and international antiquarian booktrade. In 1967, Harvard sent me on paid leave for a week of work in the Huntington Library so I could describe the aggravating rarities collected by Henry Cady Sturgis, a talented but obscure collector, and bought by the Huntington librarians at his sale in 1922. I learned an important lesson: here in our Yard we enjoy “playing” with each other, but in the real world outside lots of people don’t like us before we even meet. My fellow researchers did not come from places like Berkeley, Stanford, or Princeton, and they shunned me. I objected until one of them declared: “We don’t all get the chance to preach in the cathedral.” I worked hard, and I believe that we parted in mutual respect. I explained my research and inquired of theirs. Don’t forget that John Harvard recruited you to accomplish great things, not just to faunt his name. Jonah published my Wegelin Addenda in 1969: 263 titles in 358 editions. In 1978, I spent the month of July on a Huntington Library fellowship, sweetened by a William F. Milton fellowship from the Medical School, which I spread over three summer stints of two weeks: Library Company/Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and Yale. So I could gobble up all their books, as well the copyright registers at LC. In London, I would work in the British Museum afer a day of book hunting for Harvard, and back home I tracked the books located by Evans or Sabin at the Boston Athenæum. Ten some fun: in 1981 I published the U.S. poetry copyrights and in 1982 my fle of 124 unfndable Lost Books. In 1982 I delivered my big paper “Poet & Printer in Colonial and Federal America,” which my Penn State editors made me scan and update as part of the 2012 American poetry bibliography. My book hunting trips for the library in Paris from 1973 on led to work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, resulting in published bibliographies of La Mettrie, Senancour, J.-C. Brunet, Ronald Davis, Edmond Jabès, Andrée Chedid, and (in the 2012 Bulletin du bibliophile), J.-M.Quérard.

VII

My fnal months in the library were very busy. When I agreed to retire from Harvard in December 2004, that prevented me from teaching in fall term, so the 2003–2004 academic year marked the fnal oferings of English 296 (Descriptive Bibliography) and Adams 105 (Printed Books as a Field of Study). By summer I had established the text of the essay and labels for my fnal exhibition, Res Gestæ, Libri Manent, which I was translating as “Roger Eliot Stoddard is All Washed Up, but the Books are Still Here.” As Zeph Stewart retorted when he heard me, “Tat’s not Latin!”

Roger E. Stoddard 31 I had accepted an invitation from my friend Wallace Kirsop to come lecture in Melbourne, so I spent ten days there in October, holding forth in various venues. I delivered my farewell address to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, which was meeting and holding its bookfair there. I took my text from an exchange of letters with Herbert Blank, our faithful Stuttgart agent: “Let Us Remain in Friendly Contact.” For a joint meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Bibliographical Societies, I spoke on “What Can a Librarian Do,” dilating on “My Vienna [bookhunting],” “Solzhenitsyn and Me [],” “A Yank at Cerisy-La-Salle [my Jabès bibliography],” and “Te Results [twenty-four recent acquisitions].” And since I was supposed to pay attention to the Legal Resource Centre, University of Melbourne, I spoke on “Two Lawyer Book Collectors in Nineteenth-Century Portland, Maine.” Tese Melbourne talks are all published. I also ofered workshops at the Centre for the Book on compiling my bibliography of Primo Levi and on the American poetry bibliography. I had applied for a second Huntington Library fellowship, this one to trace the provenance of their copies, information not included in the library’s public records. On the way to our department heads meeting, I found a Huntington Library rejection letter in my box, so I had to announce to colleagues that I had been turned down just as we were awarding our own fellowships. Two weeks later came a second letter, this time an acceptance (“Take mercy on the old guy?”). So Helen and I would spend four weeks in March and April 2005 in San Marino while I trolled through old accession cards and added provenance to my Huntington records. At the Brattle Bookshop in 2003, I noticed that the New England Historic Genealogical Society had discarded a Boston book written and donated by a founder Samuel G. Drake, so I wondered if they might agree to part with their unique Day of Doom fragment (see fgures 3.2 and 3.3). Over the years I had found more fragments matching my old photostats of the Carter Brown’s, which I dated 1666, but no further fragments of the 1662/63 edition. I made contact. “How much would that be worth?” they asked. “At least ten thousand dollars,” I replied. “Or $14,000?” “Yes, I would go that.” “Well, we will have to get it appraised.” “No matter what the appraiser says, I will still pay the $14,000,” I promised. Delays ensued. “I have kept the money aside,” I said, “and afer I retire my colleagues might not care about it.” Finally word came down, so Peter Accardo and I went in town and retrieved the book and their invoice. I funded it to the Roger Eliot Stoddard book acquisition fund (established by Mel Seiden) and the Parkman D. Howe fund for New England authors, capped by two thousand dollars contributed by Bill Bond for acquisitions. Eventually I learned that they had asked Ken Gloss at the Brattle Book Shop, and he had said “At least ten thousand dollars.” (You can see that Ken and I are true brothers.) At night I was regularizing my poetry notes into systematic entries in sixteen fles. Ten, on the second of December 2004, my sixty-ninth birthday, Res Gestæ opened

32 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem Figure 2.2. Michael Wigglesorth. Te Day of Doom. Cambridge: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, [1662 or 1663]. Fragment, badly damaged. 16 cm, reproduced at actual size above. *AC6.W6395.662d.

Roger E. Stoddard 33 Figure 2.3. Te Day of Doom fragment, showing the ownership inscription of James Blak[e] (1624–1700), resident of Dorchester.

34 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem with lectures by colleagues from the Bodleyan Library (Oxford), Library Company of Philadelphia, Avery Architecture Library (Columbia), Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, moderated by Ann Blair. Pierre Berès came over from Paris, and Arthur Vershbow came to the dinner. It’s a way to go, but by January frst I was a phantom—except that in December my friends in the English Department had taken me in as Associate, an honor with immediate rewards.

VIII

Tey got me started on FileMaker Pro, and I created 7,000 index points on entry number: place of publication, printers and publishers, artists and engravers, , dedicatees, provenance, subject, author and title. Te frst response from Penn State Press would be, “Te index will have to be done over because the page numbers will change.” What page numbers? My big boss, President Drew Faust, tells me that she “especially enjoyed the indexes.” Historians want names. You know there are many descriptions of the practice of bibliography, but truly bibliography is about numbers and names. When was it printed, when was it published, really published? How many pages make a complete copy, how many inserted leaves, how many illustrations? Te best names are not copied from the title page but they are corrections or attributions. Others come from copyright registers, subscription proposals, re-issues of sheets, agents’ names from ads and bindings, and the “Marks [lef] in Books” by owners. Yes, historians want names and bibliographers supply them; all the better if they index them! On April 30, 2005, at the Grolier Club I delivered my farewell address to the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America: “No More Mr. Nice Guy; or How to Get along When Roger’s Not around Anymore.” John Kohn was my memorial dedicatee, Walt Whitman my poet, as in “Goodbye my fancy.” Recruiting booksellers and teaching Harvard undergraduates were the bright spots in my long years of library service. When the Bibliographical Society of America agreed to publish my 800-page, ffy-years-in-the-making complete rehaul of Wegelin’s American poetry bibliography, I asked for an editor, and they gave me David Whitesell, a very great bookman who has made my book much better than it could have been without him: night and day! Last week I leafed through my notebook of correspondence about the bibliography from 2003. I will not revisit the old arguments about alphabetical or chronological arrangement of the entries and whether re-issues of sheets deserve separate entries or the reader reports by rare book catalogers line by line: vertigo. But I found one gem, and you can quote me on this: “How many times do we open a bibliography in a foreign language that we do not understand very well or not at all, only to get stuck because we

Roger E. Stoddard 35 do not understand the order of battle!” I lay that all out in my introduction (parts of the entry, abbreviations, and location symbols). By my lights the best bibliographies are the ones that gather together the most diverse books. (Wait until you see what Ken Carpenter [another of Jackson’s former assistants] will do.) Oh, it’s ok if you make a bibliography of your novelist who never changed publishers: every bibliography has a use. But my bibliography has books from 160 American cities and towns in twenty-fve states and D.C., half of them from towns outside Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; and 120 of my books come from abroad (only eighty of them from London). And you will fnd books composed in foreign languages or translated into them. So, take my book and make more books: historical editions of Te Day of Doom, Te Hasty Pudding, and Winchester’s Elegy on John Wesley. Study the colporteurs, and fnd out who they were and what else they did and sold. Collect the anthologies, attribute the authors, and make indexes. Describe the generic town poet, who he was and what he cared about. Find your own subject: the material is there. But you know that bibliographers are just relay runners, so now it’s your turn: take my book and destroy it (not all at once please, but bit by bit): fnd the author’s name, also the printer’s, fnd the correct date, correct the typos, and fnd the lost ones. If you love me, then get to work. I’m available.

36 How I Found the Poets and How I Lef Tem Contributors

Mario Bannoni, a sixth generation Roman, specializes in the Italian Risorgimento and the Roman Republic. An independent researcher and historian of the Roman Republic of 1849, he is president of the Italian Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee; in 2010 he organized the conference held at Rome in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital “Margaret Fuller Ossoli, le donne e l’impegno civile nella Roma risorgimentale” (M.F.O., the women and the civil engagement in the Rome of the Risorgimento), in which he was the keynote speaker. He is coauthor with Gabriella Mariotti of Margaret Fuller’s biography Vi scrivo da una Roma barricata (I write to you from a barricaded Rome), 2012; and author of a forthcoming article on “Margaret Fuller and the Question of Marriage,” and a forthcoming monograph “Giorni d’Amore e di Gloria, Corrispondenze di Margaret Fuller dalla Repubblica Romana” (Days of love and glory, correspondence of Margaret Fuller from the Roman Republic).

David King Dunaway is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, having earned the frst doctorate in American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He is author and editor of ten volumes, including biographies of Aldous Huxley and Pete Seeger. His popular writings have appeared in publications from Country Music to the New York Times.

Stephanie Spong is a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellow in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, where she is completing a dissertation on the love poem in literary modernism. Her work is forthcoming in the William Carlos Williams Review and Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

Roger E. Stoddard is Associate, Department of English, Harvard University. In 2004 he retired as Curator of Rare Books in the Harvard College Library, Senior Curator in the Houghton Library, and Senior Lecturer on English. His essay on “Livres perdus. (Lost Books.) Humoresque” is printed in Le Livre, La Photographie, L’Image & La Lettre: Essays in Honor of André Jammes (Paris: Aux Éditions des Cendres, 2015).

David J. Supino is currently serving on the Councils of Te Bibliographical Society of America and the Grolier Club. His most recent works are Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions (2006), and the Second Edition, Revised of that work (2014).

Harvard Library Bulletin 67